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Best of 2009: Songs!

I’ve struggled this year finding favorite albums. Sure, there were good ones. The one I listened to most consistently since its release has been Monsters of Folk. But even there, the second half doesn’t live up to the promise of the first half.

I’ve always been an album kind of gal. But, as times change so must I. It even seems like artists, including “indie” ones, aren’t bothering with the album as an art form any longer. The exceptions may be The Flaming Lips’s Embryonic and Julian Casablancas’s Phrazes for the Young, both of which contain strict rules on sound and instrumentation. That’s good and bad. Albums can be consistent in more than just sound…there’s many ways for an album to mesh together into a coherent piece of work. Just look at two more great albums this year, Dark Was the Night and Dark Night of the Soul (no they aren’t the same thing or even connected). These collections of various artists all sound like they belong together, even though they don’t sound the same. They just feel the same.

So, with that said, I welcome you to my favorite tracks of 2009, in some kind of order. (Most links will open the Google audio player in a new tab.)

Another John Doe – thenewno2: Actually this came out in 2008 or something on MySpace or in France or something, but it wasn’t officially released until this year.